Morrison asks instead, “Who are these people?”-focusing not on the victimized enslaved, but on the victimizing owners. In her 1831 memoir, Prince described her owner’s reinforcement of hierarchy through beating her master “would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped…walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure.” Thirty years later, Jacobs wrote of how slavery made “the white fathers cruel and sensual the sons violent and licentious.” Within slavery, the process of Othering is physical, and is meant to work in only one direction, from the slaver to the slave. Morrison’s earliest witnesses of Othering are two women who had been enslaved, Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom later recorded their physical and mental torture at the hands of their owners.
Morrison’s lectures and book are a historic achievement, as they confirm the impact of her intellectual tradition in American thought-a tradition that links her to James Baldwin, and in a younger generation Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the critique of whiteness. Not until 2014, when Herbie Hancock addressed “The Ethics of Jazz,” did the Norton recognize wisdom in the humanities as both pertaining to American culture and emanating from a black body.
#Love and mercy movie review new york times series#
Historically the series has shown a preference for European topics and for British scholars as avatars of learning.
Within the Norton Lectures’ tradition of wisdom, and among its tellers, Morrison represents a novelty by virtue of her gender, her race, and her American subject matter. The Origin of Others is the result of her lectures in the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, where she is only the fourth woman and the second black lecturer in the 92-year history of the series. Morrison herself has received nearly all the honors a novelist can win: the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the French Legion of Honor, among many more. Surely thanks to the more multicultural, multiracial canon that Morrison helped foster, no respectable version of American literature today omits writers of color. Although the theme of desegregating the literary canon reappears in The Origin of Others, times have changed since Playing in the Dark. Morrison’s history of Othering represents an intervention in history on several fronts.
0 kommentar(er)
